Staging Science Fiction: Sales Pitch

Sales Pitch will be at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster on September 16th 2010



The living unit of Ed and Sally Morris, 23rd Century.


Over and over, when talking about this project, I’ve made, or heard, comparisons to TV shows. Sometimes I talk about Raumpatrouille Orion, the German 60’s TV show in which spaceship instruments are ornamented with intricate protuberances, occasionally made of thinly disguised kitchen implements. At other times, when I was explaining how I intended to make the set, people would start reminiscing about the crafts in children’s shows . I use these comparisons as a sort of shorthand, to convey some of what it’s starting to look like, but using them rankles, somehow. Yes, I'm using video in the show, but live not recorded, and I'm trying to use it in as theatrical a way as I can. After all, the whole idea for me was to see whether I could reconcile my interest in technology and the future with my love of theatre; live, immediate theatre, not the recorded media of film and TV.

Science Fiction in theatre is rare, and difficult; to Americans the very phrase evokes a TV show. Everyone knows that Science Fiction works on TV. TV and movies, with their photographic clarity, seem hyper-real. Even though we know that they are as carefully artificial as anything in theatre, even when they are stylized, even when they use the most spectacular of effects, the camera gives them a certain plausibility. Theatre cannot, with the same plausibility, show events or materials so far outside our direct experience. Theatre cannot plausibly show you a non-humanoid alien, or a supernova. Theatre can implausibly show you anything, all you have to do is agree to pretend.

Because I’d railed so often at how different movie adaptations of Philip K. Dick were from his marvelous stories, I decided to start with him. It was partly a way of poking fun at my own ambitions: in one corner Aliki Chapple, in the other, a group of Hollywood blockbusters! It was also because his stories are so well-made that they could easily be adapted, so prescient that they still had things to say.

From the beginning I knew that I would be working within the constraints of my small skills as a prop-maker and even smaller budget. I also knew that I wanted it as much as possible, to be live. I started work in adapting Sales Pitch in February. Most of the decisions I’ve made since have been about how to work within these constraints; how to create the story on the stage, not plausibly, but imaginably. I could never disguise that my spaceship and planets were hastily made with the cheapest of materials, and if I tried to, I’d lose the goodwill, the willingness of the audience to pretend, that was my greatest asset. So I decided to be obvious about it. I’m making spaceships out of plastic water bottles, planets out of papier mache, 23rd Century living units out of box files.

I want the audience to make no mistake, to see that the staging of Sales Pitch is saying “Let’s pretend.” not “This is so”. And it’s that quality, despite the different nature of the media, that it shares with early Science Fiction television shows; and why I should, after all, embrace comparison with them. The people who made those shows didn’t allow their imaginations to be restricted by the limitations of their skills and means. Neither do children who make robots out of tinfoil-covered boxes. They dare to imagine more than they can represent, and invite you to join them; so do I.

Mainlining Irony : Theatre, technology, and me.

A few weeks ago I attended an event at Contact Theatre. Convened by iShed , it was aimed at theatre people interested in combining theatre and pervasive media. The workshop, as it was described, was organized along the lines of an open space event, with participants splitting off into self-selected groups to discuss particular ideas. Each idea was a candidate for a 10,000 pound R &D commission to explore a new and exciting way of using pervasive media in a theatre project. Discussing one idea, someone remarked on how useful it would be if there were a system, based on galvanic skin response perhaps, or EEG readings, to monitor an audience’s response to a performance and tailor the performance accordingly. I couldn’t resist. “I know a system that does that” I said, and added, in the eager silence that followed, “a company of actors”. The workshop participants were nice people; nobody shouted at me, and I got a few chuckles.

I knew my interjection wasn’t going to be taken seriously, but I wasn’t joking. It seems silly to me to look for technological means to do things that human beings already do well, with skill and pleasure. It seems more than silly; it seems wasteful, and, as the reality of our unsustainable energy consumption dawns, wastefulness will soon become the least acceptable of social habits.

What, you must be wondering, was I doing there? Why would a person who felt that way attend such an event? Less than a year ago, I wouldn’t have. I would have said that what I treasure in a performance is the individual and collective virtuosity of actors, the relationship between actors and audience, and the bond among audience members experiencing the same show; that technology disrupts these connections, atomizing, distancing, undermining everything that I love about theatre.

I still cherish the same things, but I’m no longer so sure that technology necessarily weakens them; it’s just that most of the ways I’ve seen it used do. I began to believe that it was possible to use technology, particularly the new media, to serve what I love about theatre, perhaps even to draw new audiences to it. Instead of saying that I dislike the use of technology in theatre, I started asking how theatre is affected by the rapid pace of technological change. There are two sides to the question. How can theatre bear the comparison, and the financial competition, from the highly realistic and easily available media of electronic entertainment? To what extent can theatre make use of these newer media for its own ends?

To answer the question, in either formulation, in words, that is, in theory, I’d have to unpick the assumptions out of which they’re made. I’d have to ask further questions, “What is technology?” “What is theatre?” and “What can possibly said to be ‘it’s own ends’? Even then, I don’t think I would have gotten the kinds of answers I needed, answers I could immediately apply to the shows I was making, the shows I wanted to make. I’m on a practice-based course; I wanted to answer the question in practice, in theatre.

I decided to avoid the troublesome issues of narrative, text and character and defined theatre for myself, very loosely, as live and proximate performance. Since September, everything I’ve made has been a theatrical response to the challenge posed by current technology. If I were good at graphics, I could plot them on a chart for you. One axis would be marked from most to least theatrical; the other would measure the sophistication of the technology:

One of my approaches was to attempt to rival the beautifully rendered imagined realities of Hollywood and the gaming industry with the ancient techniques of storytelling and puppetry and the best SFX department on Earth, the human imagination.

Explorers:
An intimate Science Fiction show staged a round a pub table that uses simple, readily available props to illustrate its story. First performed in December 09, this is the most frugal and flexible of these projects. It needs no technical support, the props fit into my pockets and it can be performed just about anywhere.

Sales Pitch
Another Science Fiction show, this will most likely be both less frugal and less intimate but it will still be very low-tech. At the moment it is a work in progress, and very near the beginning of that progress, consisting of little more than a draft script and a casting choice.

Something else I tried was to explore the effect of actor on audience by putting the illusion of virtual presence right up against the reality of physical proximity.

I’m Listening:
A one-on-one performance that is also an installation, I’m Listening has received support from the Green Room. It puts a performer in a small space with a monitor playing a DVD suspended in front of her face, facing the audience. The screen invites the watcher to tell a true story, whether significant or trivial, then cuts to a recording of the actor’s face. The recording shows that face listening to a story. Inevitably, this is not the story that is actually being told at the time of performance and the reactions are either out of sync, or otherwise inappropriate. At the same time, the actor behind the screen is listening as openly and as compassionately as she can. The conflict between the subtle human signals conveyed directly and the recorded ones on the screen is what the experience is all about.


I've also been looking at the converse effect; how audiences influence actors. I call these shows experiments in crowdscripted performance.

A Little Bird Told Me . . .
Like I’m Listening, this is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between the digital and the material by putting them up against each other, and it came out of the improvisation workshops I convened at Lancaster University. A collaboration between three performers, (one of whom is also a computer scientist) and a visual artist, it looks at private and public communication through the media of eavesdropping and Twitter. This show is durational, task-based and partly improvised and will be performed for the first time at the ‘pool side Emergency festival on May 22nd at the Bluecoat.

The Request Robot:
This is a solo performance with a very simple premise: the robot does only what the audience want, conveyed to her by text message, twitter, or perhaps some other technological medium. I wont explain further because I’ve written about it extensively in these posts.

The Remote Clapping Game
As the title suggests, this is not so much a show as a game, albeit a very theatrical one. I discuss the classic form of the game here. My first attempt to make it work at a distance will be at Manchester’s first Sandpit, a testing ground for social games. This will take place at Contact Theatre on May 15th as part of Play Everything in the Future Everything Festival.

This version of the game will be quite low-tech and only relatively remote. Eventually, I would like to develop it to the point where it has a dedicated website and can be played internationally, either with teams competing simultaneously in different countries, or with audience in one country and performer in the other.

The Crowdscripted Play
This was the very first thing I came up with when I started trying to think of ways to use technology that actors would find interesting. It is also what brought me to the event I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The idea is that a performance text would be projected into the space, which the audience could change during the course of the performance, leaving the actors to improvise what they would do with the new lines and stage directions.
I don’t know yet whether it would be an intervention on a well-known play or original material, or whether it would be scripted by the audience then and there. I don’t know whether contributions would be from the audience as a whole or a few selected writers, or whether there would be a selection process for the incoming text, or what such a process might be. There are a whole lot of things I don’t know about how it would work. That’s why I’m applying for the R&D commission.

Improvisation Workshops: Week 5: Documentation

For some time, I've been dropping hints to the Impro group that there's more to this project than working on our skills, important though that is. Last week we were mostly feeling under the weather, so I decided to spend the session talking about it. I said that I was trying to build a company, partly because I like to make theatre with others and I'm sick of trying to do it on my own, but also to explore the possibility of integrating live, proximate performance with technology in a new way. As I've said elsewhere, much of the experimentation I see along those lines seems dull at best from an actors point of view; the artistry is not primarily in the performance of it.

I outlined some ideas and suggested we might try two things: An on-campus experiment in adapting theApplause Game to new media sometime in the next term and a cross-platform performance for the upcoming Poolside Emergency festival at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. We started batting some ideas around (with, as J pointed out, considerable complicity) and before we knew it, we had the beginnings of a show. I don't want to talk about it too much just yet, but my notes from that first meeting, enough to tantalize you I hope, can be seen below:

Am I a Luddite?

If you’ve ever been to a show with me, you’ve probably heard me complain about how dominant technology is in contemporary staging. I gripe about the use of recorded music: It’s a quick, easy way to trigger emotion in an audience by setting off a string of shared associations, it’s ubiquitous in the movies and on TV, and a clear indicator of lack of theatrical imagination. I gripe about microphones: They erase much natural variation, giving all voices the same amplified quality; vocal projection was once a the basic skills without which it wouldn’t occur to you to call yourself an actor, and it’s really not that hard to learn. I even gripe, with reservations born of my respect for the skills involved, against lights: They add enormously to the expenses of production, and theatre, like every other industry, is, at some point, going to have to consider the environmental cost of its habits. Most of all, though, I gripe about the use of video. Projected or on a monitor, live or recorded, I don’t want video in my theatre.

Am I a Luddite?

I’ve been bothered by this question, off and on, for a while, so I’ve been trying to understand why it is that video in theatre bothers me so much. Am I just being reactionary, demonstrating that in the 21st century you can be an old fogey at 39, or is there something else going on?

One reason I hate it is that video is everywhere these days: I work sitting in front of a screen, I play, more often than not, sitting in front of a screen. I have a choice of screens on which to watch movies; they’re in my pocket, on my desk, on my wall. I make phonecalls, talking to the screen on my phone or the one on my computer. I read articles on them, some people read books. There are monitors on the train platforms, on the bus stops, on the walls of the theatre foyer, even, as of the new year, in the playground of my kid’s school. Is it too much to ask that an art form now defined, in part, by its liveness and proximity, should be free of them?

Standing in the playground at my son’s school, talking to other parents, my eye is always drawn over their shoulders to that newly installed monitor. It shows pictures of school events, the dinner menu, the school calendar; things I already know, or don’t need to. I can’t help looking; even when I make a conscious effort not to, the flickering change of images lingers at the corner of my vision, insistent. The same thing happens when I go to a show. I’ve come to see what these people do, here, now, unrepeatably, while breathing the same air as me; but let them share that space with a monitor and I struggle to unglue my gaze from its rectangular, eyeless face.

Take a flashlight and a candle into a darkened room and light both. The candle might as well not be there, right? It can’t compete. The flashlight is steadier, much brighter, more focused. Turn the flashlight off and you may find the candle’s charms; how warm the light is, how it flatters, how fascinating the flame’s subtle changes are, how it enlivens the shadows, populating them with its tremulous dance. Something similar happens with actors and video: set them against each other and somehow, the human is diminished.

Last year, I saw one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on stage: I hated it. I’ll probably regret writing this, because I know, and like, some of the people involved, but Kellerman, by Imitating the Dog, made me cringe. I’ll say it again: it was beautiful: well-crafted, inventive, clever; it looked and sounded amazing, and unlike much “experimental theatre” was stuffed with genuine experimentation. So why did I hate it? The question kept worrying away at me, and the answer I came up with was this: What I couldn’t accept, despite the stunning aesthetics of the thing, was the video, and the way it was used. Each performer stood in front of a video-close up of his or her face on the elaborate set, miked to compete with the soundtrack, delivering lines in sync with the movement of their own giant, pre-recorded mouths. Speaking of one of the company, someone I know assured me that she was an integral part of the devising of the piece. She had, I was told ‘artistic ownership’ and wasn’t ‘just a jobbing actor’. As someone who would would be proud to call herself a jobbing actor, I dislike the implications of the statement, but I understand why it was made. Their artistic input as devisers needed to be stressed because as performers, they were so hobbled by the set-up as to have very little. The artistry in performance, the minute changes in inflection and timing that make the difference between great and indifferent were largely closed off to the company, tethered to their own moving images, doomed to deliver reenactments of what they had been recorded doing.

Not all video use disenfranchises actors so radically. I will argue, though, that it always does so to some extent, at least in every use I’ve seen. The more video is used, the more cameras and monitors and cables clutter up the playing space, the less room there is, both metaphorically and actually, for actors to manoeuvre.

Am I a Luddite?

I’m not a technophobe. I own a laptop, and I bought myself an iPhone for my birthday. I have a Twitter account. Heck, I write this blog! I’m not arguing that theatre should fence itself off from technological development. Do that, and we risk becoming obsolete, or a cottage industry to serve the rarified tastes of the wealthy, like those who craft artisanal bread, or handmade shoes.

I’ve always believed passionately in the opposite of that: theatre as a popular artform. It’s in competition now, as never before, with film, television, digital games and the various other diversions that our many monitors can offer us. Is the answer to make theatre more like the countless varieties of available onscreen entertainment? Will that make people likelier to come out to see it? I doubt it. I doubt, in fact, that theatre’s diminishing appeal has to do with competition from recorded dramatic forms. People are willing to go out, in their thousands, to see, live, in person, what they know only from recordings; the huge success of stand-up comedy gigs, and the often-reported fact that bands now make their living from touring rather than record sales make this clear. Whatever theatre is doing wrong, it’s not the liveness, and it’s not the proximity.

I haven't read much of the history of the period, but according to Wikipedia, anyway, the original Luddites weren’t exactly technophobes either, though the way in which the word is usually used might well make you think so. They were weavers who, about 200 years ago, rebelled against the loss of their livelihoods from the institution of automated looms. Their solution was simple: destroy the looms. I doubt they objected to technological advance in its entirety; offer a Luddite modern medicine for his ailments and I can’t believe he’d turn it down. What they fought against was not progress, but the poverty and humiliation that came with industrialisation. What had once been a skilled trade, in which many took pride, was becoming unskilled labour. There were ever fewer jobs in weaving, their skills were not valued, and pay and working conditions growing ever worse. They were labour activists, artisans asserting the worth of their skills and the dignity of their craft.

It's probably pretty presumptuous of me, since my training in the trade has been patchy and my employment patchier, but:
I guess I am a Luddite.